


the hand of nergal

by orphan_account



Series: The Birth Of Iron [3]
Category: Battle of Tollense River c. 1250 bce
Genre: Bronze Age, Multiple Religion & Lore Sources, Politics, ao3 does not have a tag for references to early semitic religion, references to religious prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:21:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22402510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In the eastern part of the shaking sea, a priest worries.
Series: The Birth Of Iron [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1585591
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	the hand of nergal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellen_fremedon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/gifts).



Omsak had seen a ghost right after he’d become priest. Hot night and he couldn’t sleep, and he lay on his pallet in the temple quarters with his hand over his mouth, trying to figure whether he should rest or perhaps get up to pee. And then he’d seen it, a white wisp in his doorway.

He had been quite aggravated on top of the sleeplessness. He was a priest, if only a junior one, and no one should be in his quarters. He got up, and he followed it, and in the moonlight before the reflecting pool, his mouth dropped open. His chest seized, and he said “Tam?”

The ghost looked at him. Omsak woke up without remembering how he’d come back to bed. The sheets had twisted as if to strangle him.

Omsak disliked ghosts. He disliked what he was hearing from the west, which seemed to promise many of them. He drummed his fingers on Hariya’s back.

“We should ban ships,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“We should,” he insisted.

“We’ll starve, what with the seasons we’ve had.” Hariya rolled over and groaned. “Besides, the Ahiyans will take it as an insult.”

“Oh, like I care. They take everything as an insult.”

“We cannot afford to make enemies right now. Not after last season.”

“That’s my whole point,” Omasak said. “We can’t afford plague.”

“We have to hold out,” Hariya said. “Just to the end of the season. If there is a plague it’ll die out in winter.”

Omsak grumbled but he set his forehead on Hariya’s ribcage. She scratched at the back of his neck, like he was a cat. Hariya could think things through without talking them out. She said everything right the first time. She should have reigned in Alasi-Ya, she should have been Lord of the Morning. In his dark nights he admitted this was because he was sick of being it.

“We will keep the harbor open,” Hariya said, still scratching, “and the Ahiyans won’t rebel.”

“They’ll find another excuse,” Omsak said.

“Well, they can find it later down the line, when the seasons have improved.” She flicked the back of his head. “Then we’ll bribe them to shut up.”

Omsak groaned. The sun split dawn into the quarters of the Lord of the Morning. The servants were stirring, and they’d be puzzled if the Lord of the Morning wasn’t up, doing lordly things in the morning. Omsak mouthed a kiss somewhere north of Hariya’s belly and sat up. “Til the equinox,” he said.

“Til halfway between equinox and solstice.”

“Deal,” Omsak said.

“Then we can panic,” Hariya said.

Omsak smiled. “Deal,” he said, and he went to shuffle on his robes.

As a child, Omsak had sat shaking with exhaustion from the ordeals at the temple, and he had recognized what the highest priest called the gods speaking. That was just the bright sheen that happens from too much hunger and pain. The other boys came from rich families and hadn’t experienced it before. His suspicions had been confirmed as he rose to become the highest-of-priests, and then the king of Alasi-Ya, and he felt genuinely awful about it, but there wasn’t much he could do. He had been dedicated as a baby, and he recognized by now how belief worked: folk said terrible things would happen if a priest fled his duties, which meant they’d do terrible things to prove themselves right. He carried his gloomy burden from harvest to funeral and would keep it tucked in his grave, where it would shrivel and die with the rest of him. The gods did not exist.

“Lord of the Morning,” he said, prostrate before the great statue of Nergal, “shine through me!”

He could feel the servants relax in how their footsteps rang on the floor.

"Come forth in war, come forth in peace, let me remain in splendor of your light!"

The seasons had been bad. Three seasons of drought, of hunger, of little yield. Four seasons ago, there had been a great wave, and it had come across the coast of Alasi-Ya and salted the farmland. The sea shook. The Ahiyans sacrificed a white bull on the shore, as they did for fucking everything. Those who prayed to the gods-from-Ugarit came to Omsak’s temple, where he was both priest and, after the death of his first wife, king. Omsak did the math of the destruction and realized to his great unease that he would have to send an intense amount of copper to Mizri. Buy all their grain.

There had been a belch from the earth. It happened. The Ahiyans said it was some kind of sea god. Omsak presumed this sea god enjoyed well-cooked beef. His people said it was Livayit, which had always bothered him in terms of their logic – had not Ba’al Adod slain Livayit and sank its corpse beneath the waves? Was that not the entire point of the shrine to Ba’al Adod resting on the northernmost tip of the Spine of Alasi-Ya, and the priest who sang within? Omsak had spent a long time thinking about it, and he’d come up with a theory. The tides came with the moon, and sometimes the tides were worse than others. Under the water of the sea was earth, and the earth had tides too, but they came slowly, as earth was heavier, and the stones wreaked more havoc when they dragged across the sea floor; they pulled so hard at the sea floor that they left gouges. If you gouged at yourself scratching an itch the blood would come to the surface, and it would be hot. Omsak had quietly determined that the sea had boiled, and then the heavy earth had exploded, like a clay pot left too long on a fire.

“That makes sense,” Hariya said.

“Does it?” Omsak was relieved, and increasingly nervous. He dandled the wine-jug on his knee. He had married this Amorite woman because the king of Ugarit had desired it and Alasi-Ya had to be prostrate to Ugarit if they wanted safety from Mizri. Why this one, he did not know. She was beautiful, well-borne, and an Amorite, and that appeared to be the sum total of her qualifications. The king of Ugarit had said something about her being a devotee of Ashtara.

Hariya shrugged. “Makes more sense than it being the wrath of the gods.”

Omsak’s mouth dropped open. Hariya flinched back. Omsak came up to her, his sandals clattering on the floor, and she backed away, fearing a drunk man, fearing her new husband, but he put his arms around her, and he inhaled the bright sweet scent of her agreement.

Omsak didn’t hate the gods: they didn’t exist, so there wasn’t a point. He didn’t hate anyone, really Life had to go on until it ended, and he was grateful that he had not lived and died in squalor. Grateful to whom, he could not exactly say. To his parents, maybe, except he knew how the temple trade worked, you sold your sons not for any piety but because the temple priests had a lot of copper. To Zabib, his first wife, for she had been the only daughter of Kusmesusa and had granted him royalty and given him enough sons that he didn’t have to worry about disappointing her father and who had then died sort of blandly, taking sick after the last one had been weaned. To the most recent king of Ugarit, who was not snippy about his heritage in the same way as the previous king or as the current King-God of Mirzi, and made the Mirzites treat Alasi-Ya as if it meant something, and had decreed that he marry Hariya the Amorite. Except the king of Ugarit had forced him to spend his days parrying between himself and the King-God of Mirzi, and Zabib had died in his arms, clutching at him, as if she could hold fast to life by digging into his flesh. He saw her ghost sometimes, walking the halls. Every time he ran after her, and every time she would look back at him, and he would wake up in a pool of sweat in his bed, not knowing how he’d returned.

The gods didn't exist; people existed, and they made their plots however they could. Ghosts existed, though. How they did was beyond Omsak. There had been a few months after the first ghost wherein he had prostrated himself in terror before the statues and begged forgiveness for his impiety, but the gods said nothing, and presently he reverted from stark horror to his usual gloom. Ghosts wandered, and looked accusingly at you, and that was it. Omsak disliked ghosts but they were simple, and he was jealous.

Omsak would give the kingdom to someone else, but the king of Ugarit would be very angry at him unless he installed someone exactly like him. But Keret and Yassub took after Zabib, who was fiery and overly friendly. They lived in the west of Alasi-Ya, overseeing mines. They were old enough to be resentful if their father did not pass on the crown. Besides that, they did not have the title of Lord of the Morning; that was his. Sometimes he arranged the timbers in his head and flicked them over. The God-King of Mirzi was snippy about Omsak but no one else who knew the great god Nergal, the Sharpest Sun, the Cock on the Hill, the Lion (which Omsak had seen precisely once, imported from Mirzi as a sacrifice when he became high priest) of the Morning, He Who Opens The Gates In The Land Of The Dead, bared their teeth at Alasi-Ya.

Nor did they bare their teeth at Ugarit, which was the entire point.

Omsak was tired all the time, tired of weighing complications. Tired of juggling. He did not want to be the king of Alasi-Ya. He knew that. But he’d spent long nights, pretending he was meditating about Nergal’s beneficence, and he couldn’t quite figure out what else he wanted to be.

Subservient to Hariya, perhaps.

He didn’t close the harbor. He held his breath. After about two weeks he exhaled, and he came back to Hariya. “You were right,” he said.

“Yes?”

“There hasn’t been talk of plague from the west in a half-passage of the moon.”

“Good.”

Omsak rocked on the balls of his feet in front of her. He always felt very shy, standing naked in front of Hariya, though he was coming on to his five and fortieth solar year. She wasn’t that much younger than him, perhaps ten years. Omsak had slept with two women, Zabib and Hariya. Hariya had older sisters, and she had been dedicated to Ashtara in her eighteenth year. She had spent three lunar years worshiping the goddess with her body before being released back to the Amorite aristocracy, virginal as a white calf. The priestesses of Ashtara weren’t allowed to have children and she’d eaten so much silphium that it was in her blood. He more than suspected this had been done on purpose, to prevent the coming of more sons while placating the Amorites with royal attention. She’d told him, flatly, that she suspected the same.

“We’ll get through this,” Hariya said. She opened her arms to him. “Come sleep.”

Ghosts: the one he’d seen in the moonlight, at the reflecting pool, that had been Amishtamru, the Ugaritic prince, a cousin of one of Hariya's sister's husbands, who had been dedicated to the temple at Alasi-Ya and had come as all rich boys did, proud and eagle-eyed. He should have survived, he was meant to have survived, it was the malnourished boys sold by their desperate parents who should crumble before the might of the gods, or the slaves given as offerings, and Amishtamru should have survived. Omsak had, as soon as he was high enough in the priesthood, pretended to have a revelation from Nergal saying the ordeals were no longer necessary. The boys at the temple now learned to pray, and they stuffed themselves on barley pastries.

Omsak disentangled himself from Hariya’s arms. He got out of bed to pee and he saw Amishtamru’s stride in front of the door. Omsak’s stomach roiled, but he followed.

Amishtamru’s prince body had been shocked by the starvation ordeals, and he had lost weight at a clip more rapid than the other boys. He had a festering wound on his leg, another on his ribcage; he stood there, in his loincloth and nothing else, feverish, shuddering. His eyes were rheumy.

“Tam,” Omsak said, and crouched. “Tam?”

He woke up dripping sweat in Hariya’s arms. Hariya snored with her mouth open. Omsak’s belly creaked. He put his wrist over his eyes. The gods did not exist; ghosts did. He wished he could figure out if that had any significance.

_Elder brother like to one who is my flesh,_

Omsak groaned.

“Sometimes I wish people from Ugarit would talk like normal humans,” Hariya said.

Omsak said, “Since when am I his _elder brother_?”

_Elder brother, I fall at your feet seven times, and seven times again –_

“Oh, this is bad.”

“Yes,” Omsak agreed. “Keep going.”

_Breath of my life, maidservant of You, Lord of the Morning, He Who Speaks To the Great God Nergal, I am at your feet seven times, and seven times again. I know the quality of your copper, Lord of the Morning –_

“Is he _raising tribute_ ,” Omsak said, and he felt a rare flicker of anger in his belly. “We’re on the edge of famine and – ”

Hariya grimaced. “That’s not what he wants.”

_I know the quality of your copper, Lord of the Morning! I know the quality of your bronze on the tips of your spears. Elder brother, great priest of the Shining Nergal, I fall at your feet seven times and seven times again: my spears are in the kingdom of Lukki, my bows are on the mountains of Lukki, my ships are swamped down the coast! Elder brother, you and I who share flesh, bring me spears, for there is unrest –_

“What?”

“That’s what it says.”

“He wants _soldiers_?”

“Dear,” Hariya said, “will you just let me read the thing.”

_There is unrest, and I have sent my bows to the mountains of Lukki, and my spears to the kingdom of Lukki! My gates are open and my ships are drowned. Elder brother, bring me as large a quantity of bronze-tipped spearmen as your mighty armies can spare, and I will repay you as a brother when I build new ships, I will pay you with glass bars and with tin, I will pay you with indigo and garnet. May the Lord of the Morning save my land, lest it be lost. Let my brother reach out his hand!_

Omsak had his hand over his mouth.

“Why in fuck has he sent all his bowmen to Lukki,” he said hoarsely.

Hariya put the stone down on the table and attacked her cheeks with the heels of her hands. He could see her setting up the timbers in her head same as him, knocking them over. If he spent spears to Ugarit, the Mirzi would know, and Mirzi darted after weakness like a hawk. If he didn’t send spears to Ugarit, Ugarit would fester its anger and take revenge, unless the Lukkites completely destroyed them, which was impossible: the Lukkites raided deep into Ugaritic territory, fifty years ago they had even sailed to Alasi-Ya, but they hid in the mountains. They could not stamp you out, and you could not stamp them out, and you waited for them to come to you rather than getting lost in their passes.

“Something must have happened in the land of the Lukki,” Hariya said. Her eyes were closed. “They’ve become more organized. Perhaps they’ve got a new king.”

“We can’t send spears,” Omsak said fretfully. “The seasons have been bad. We need men to till the fields.”

“Sweetheart,” Hariya said. “We can buy grain on credit from Mirzi. Ugarit has promised us tin and garnet.”

“We've bought enough grain from them that they'll hike prices. Besides, Ugarit will be mad.”

“Then both of them will be mad at us,” Hariya said, “so it’ll wash out. We’ll be trading with one and aiding the other. We have to hope that the price of grain stays steady.” She chewed her knuckle. “We should give Mirzi as much copper as we can spare, as a gift, and then buy on credit, so it doesn’t look like we’re sending military aid to Ugarit against Mirzi.”

“As much as we can spare? When the price is already so high? We’ll empty out our stores – ”

Hariya said, “Ugarit will pay us back, and it’s better than starving.”

“What about the Ahiyans? What if they rebel?”

Hariya massaged her head. “I don’t know,” she said quietly.

Omsak went to the statue of Nergal and he put his forehead down on the stone before it and he stayed there. The servants passing by heard him spitting and howling, and they assumed he was having a trance, as the Lord of the Morning did, but he was just doing the math in his head, and Hariya was right. No win. No peace. Not even the courtesy of immediate calming war. A million timbers to keep upright so they wouldn't collapse the world when they fell down.

The ground shook, a little. Earth boiling. "Oh, come _on_ ," Omsak said, to the feet of the statue of Nergal, and a little dust from the ceiling fell on his head. He lay there for more than an hour, seething like an infant, and then he got up. He told the commander of the palace guard to send messengers. He told him that the Lord of the Morning needed spears.

Half a moon later, two thousand spears had left, carried by fifteen hundred men. They left resentfully, on many boats. Omsak shaved his head but for the long topknot. He painted his face: he smeared it with white lead-paint, darkened the hollows of his eye sockets and cheeks with kohl, and he streaked black on his neck and his temples, and he came out to the square of the city. Though he was middle-aged, he was a massively tall man, three and a half cubits, and he had a broad back, and he looked like Nergal guarding the cave of the dead. He stood in the square of the city with his arms raised, under the bright hot knife of the sun at high noon, and those closest could see the scars on his body where he had conquered the ordeals. He said something about Nergal wanting the spearmen and the spearmen going to harvest. The crowd narrowed its eyes; Omsak snapped his fingers, and several guardsmen led out five white bulls. “For a good sea voyage,” he lied.

He caught the face of Alaksandu the Ahiyan. Alaksandu was not the leader of the Ahiyans, they were too diverse and entrenched for that, but he was wealthy enough to own half the copper mines on Alasi-Ya and they respected him. Alaksandu always got on at Omsak for pronouncing his name wrong. Omsak had spoken the Ahiyan tongue as a child thanks to his mother but he wasn’t very good at it now, and Alaksandu bullied him about it whenever they discussed the copper.

Alaksandu looked at the bulls, and then at Omsak, and he nodded, and Omsak was terribly relieved. The bulls died in the way of Ugarit and Nergal and Dagon, an axe to the back of the neck and then their hearts lifted up towards the piercing sun. “Let them go to the pyres on the beach,” Omsak said, which he would not say out loud was the way of the Ahiyans, “let their scent carry over the sea for good tidings,” and the crowd was placated, if not exactly happy.

He had a terrible sunburn by the time the ritual was done. He went inside and he slapped at his skin with cold wet cloths. He lay facedown on his pallet and dozed. When he woke it was night, and Hariya was at the balcony.

Omsak went out, and he looked at the sky, at the stars.

“The moon,” Hariya said, "ruins your theories."

“What?”

“Tides follow the moon.”

“Are you all right?”

“Explain the moon.”

“It’s a circle,” Omsak said. “So’s the sun. The earth is a circle, the earth’s made of stone and wood and water – ”

“Why’s it there?”

“You’re being very philosophical,” Omsak said. “Is there something the matter?”

She sniffed, but as to drive tears back into her head. Omsak looked at her, brow furrowed.

“We have a visitor,” she said. “This is a very strange one.”

“How so?”

“A woman. She landed at the northwest tip of the island. We had messengers about it while you were sleeping.”

“A woman?”

“Leading ships,” Hariya said.

“A priestess, then,” Omsak said. “From Ugarit? No, you said she was on the northwest tip. Lukkite?”

“From the west.”

Omsak tilted his head at her.

“She’s Ahiyan,” Hariya said.

“Ashtara’s tits,” Omsak said. 

Hariya put her head on the balcony and groaned, and Omsak said it for her: “She’s going to rile the Ahiyans, whatever she says.”

“Can’t imagine she won’t.”

“And they’ll revolt.”

“Yes.”

“And we don’t have any spearmen.”

“Nope.”

“And we’re all going to die.”

“Fuck,” Hariya remarked.

Omsak put his arms around her. “Do you know what she’s saying?”

“That there’s still a horrible plague to the west,” Hariya said, still slumped against the balcony, “and her uncle, who is the lord on some horrible island where they’ve run out of bulls because they keep fucking murdering them all, has gone completely fucking mental, and she’s calling for spearmen to stop him. Also she’s got a mad priestess on her who has mocked the gods by taking off her veil like a slut. I am sure this makes more sense to the Ahiyans.”

“The gods don’t exist,” Omsak said. “Maybe we can talk to her about that.”

Hariya stormed off to bed; she wasn't angry at him, she just needed to storm off sometimes. Omsak looked at the stars, and at the moon. Hariya was right, he decided. His theory didn't make much sense. He stood there under the moonlight, rolling his sunburned shoulders, until the sun came up.

The Ahiyan woman did not come.

This was because she didn’t have time. Next day the earth belched, and the buildings in Alasi-Ya crumbled, and the statue of Nergal tumbled to the floor and shattered. Omsak sat on the rubbled heap of his bedroom, watching the sea suck out. The temple hadn't collapsed but it would if they tried to leave. Hariya sat next to him; she had a wound on her head and was rubbing absently at it though it bled all over her hand. Omsak thought about how simple things were now. There were fires all around the city, and he could see them on the coast, and he could see looters and rioters. The ground still trembled. 

The sea stopped sucking.

And Omsak’s gloom trailed out of him. His prayers had been answered, hadn't they? His wish, at least, for there had been no prayers since the day after he say Amishtamru the first time. The tsunami building was a bright copper-green, flecked with boat debris and bodies: it filled the world. It was simple. No longer would he have to juggle copper and the Ahiyans and the Mirzites and the whims of Ugarit and the spears of Lukki and the plagues of the west and the grain and the starving and the Amorites and the wars and the belching earth and the garnet and the tin and his own churning, festering mind. 

From the distance the wave looked like a great beast.

He believed now. He stood and thanked Nergal for bringing Livayit down upon them. How magnificent it was. How beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m having a normal one at 4am on Wikipedia dot org today
> 
> Omsak, having a Mycenaean-speaking mother, has the only PIE-derived name: om-saq, bitter pledge. Alasi-Ya is Cyprus. Mirzi is Egypt. Lukki is in Anatolia, and the Lukka were one of the Sea Peoples. Ugarit is on the coast of modern Syria. Ahiyan is a form of Achaean, pan-Greek. Livayit is Leviathan. Every other name I took from the Ugaritic texts.
> 
> Cyprus, or at least a part of it, seems to have been client state to Ugarit for quite a while.
> 
> Title is from Amarna letter EA-35, wherein the king of Cyprus apologizes to an Egyptian pharoah for paltry tribute, as "the hand of Nergal" has killed all the copperworkers in Cyprus. This might have been a joke: Eric Cline has calculated that the Cypriot king has sent along *thirty thousand pounds* of copper.
> 
> Omsak’s prayer to Nergal quotes O Father O Satan O Sun by Behemoth, which was written by, uh, Nergal. Not the Near Eastern sun god, the Polish edgelord. Also Omsak’s ritual facepaint is based on that of [Orion from Behemoth](https://www.dreamstime.com/behemoth-orion-live-concert-black-metal-polish-extreme-band-gda%C3%A5%E2%80%9Esk-formed-considered-to-have-played-image106202886). I don't know why I did that but there you go
> 
> I don't know why I keep writing these, honestly.


End file.
